Special K9 sniffs for electronics during federal raid of Jared Fogle’s home

From the article:

> During a controlled demonstration , Bear was able to find a hard drive stashed between couch cushions, an iPad in a backpack, a micro SD card tucked away in a wine rack, a flash drive in a magazine holder and other items.

I'm very skeptical. It should me much more difficult to detect a SD card than drugs, because each drug has a unique chemical signature (even humans can sniff some drugs). But dogs have a high rate of false positives, for example this article discuss a really controlled experiment: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/supreme-court-con...

> But here's the more interesting part: The dogs were about twice as likely to falsely alert at the packages designed to trick their handlers than they were at the packages stuffed with sausages.

I think there's a market for dogs like this in the private sector. Given that "Bear" found stuff in wine racks, magazine stands and between sofa cushions, it would seem like "Bear" could help find lost or misplaced electronic bits and bobs for a small finder's fee. That would probably be a better use of such dogs than searching suspected pedophile's houses.

People will switch to using non-silicon based mediums of storage that a dog will not have the options to sniff out.

They already have moved beyond hardware when it comes to storing the types of things they are searching for anyways. Serious.

This is the part I thought HN would find interesting:

“Bear is unique because he can sniff out SD cards, thumb drives, external hard drives, iPads and micro SD cards,” said Todd Jordan, chief handler with Tactical Detection K9.